VM failed to power on with the error: The object or item referred to could not be found

Last week I came across an issue where a powered off VM was showing a inaccessible and after fixing this issue when I tried to power on this VM, end up with this error,

"The object or item referred to could not be found"

Under tasks its showing as unregistering and then reregistering the VM (this task failed at 15%).

This was first time when I faced this issue so was amazed. Then I started looking about this error over web and luckily I found  VMware KB# 2047271 which is related to the error that I was getting.

As per this KB article this is a known issue affecting ESXi 5.0 and 5.1 and the work around of this issue is, one will have to rescan the datastores for the ESXi cluster. Rescanning datastores just for the host on which your VM is will not work, I am saying this as it didn’t work for me but you can give it a try too. Who knows it might work for you ;)

To rescan datastores for esxi host or cluster or datacenter, right click on it and select Rescan for Datastores…

Once the datastore rescan will complete, you will be able to poweron the VM.

That’s all…. J